


Good as Gold

by onnenlintu



Category: Deathgasm (2015)
Genre: I'm disappointed, M/M, am i looking in the wrong part of ao3 or is this literally only the second fanfic for this movie?, come on you guys, there was enough gay subtext to launch 1000 fanfics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 02:50:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18512368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: After Zakk is semi-accidentally summoned back from hell, there's a lot of rebuilding to do. Redecorating the living room with dodgy paintings of Satan turns out to be close enough.





	Good as Gold

“It’s not _that_ surprising.” The final _ing_ in _surprising_ skipped and repeated a couple of times as the old record spun, warping Zakk’s voice for a moment into something clicky and shrill. Brodie smacked the record player on its side, and the clicking stopped. “She was always a weird chick anyway. Although I dunno why her being a lesbian now would make her dump _you_ , given that you have such a gay girly face - ”   
  
“ _Technically_ , she didn’t dump me. It was a mutual decision.”  
  
“Ooo, _mutual decision!_ Did you do each others’ hair and talk about your feelings too while you had your, like, _adult relationship discussion?_ ”  
  
Brodie just waited for Zakk to be done. Hell sounded like a hard time, and he probably had something or other to get out of his system, and calling Brodie gay for talking to girls seemed to be his number-one choice for facilitating that process. Of course, Zakk only ever talked about how _totally brutal_ it was down there, but even if he was laughing off the way he’d broken his arm two weeks ago - did they even have _weeks_ in hell? - it hadn’t sounded fun.  
  
“...Oh hey, that reminds me though, Brodie-Brodie-Bro _diiie_ ” - Zakk was punching something solid and unseen to punctuate this - “how’s the plan going?”  
  
“Not bad - why does it remind you?”  
  
“Well you're _clearly_ losing it without me there, and - ” Zakk yelped, and Brodie heard the distant roar of some animal-type thing he couldn’t identify by sound. “ _Fuck!_ Fuck _off,_ ya shit cunt!”   
  
Brodie listened with some worry as the sounds of flesh squelching drifted through whatever portal this record kept open, then the sound of bones cracking, and finally a whoop of victory in Zakk’s unmistakeable over-loud voice. “Um, Zakk, are you done… killing whatever that was?”  
  
“Yea.” Zakk's breath was ragged. Brodie considered asking if he was just out of breath after beating some demon to death, or if it was something to do with already being injured, but decided getting another bout of mockery for caring was not going to be productive.   
  
“So yeah, the plan. I’ve been looking at the books. Wrote a few riffs - ”  
  
“Shithouse ones, probably.”  
  
“Yeah, okay, _probably_ , Zakk. Anyway, I think we’ll be able to try again in a couple of days - ”   
  
“We?”  
  
“You know, me and the rest of the band, as in Dion and Giles...”  
  
“I thought just _you_ were going to do it.”  
  
Brodie could never work out what drove these bursts of random petulance. “Are you gonna keep being a sook, or let me save you from hell already?”   
  
**********  
  
That night, Brodie’s sleep was like the most adorable of fluffy sheep. That is to say, while his features were so calm you’d think there was negative brain activity behind them, his actual feelings were a mix of near-constant panic and confusion. For a moment, the truth broke out onto his face, and he grimaced while rolling over onto the pile of paper beside him. It was the product of a long afternoon’s work, evil musical notation that spiked up and down to mark out riffs. As it so happened, they were actually pretty tight.   
  
Good thing Brodie’s cousin was long dead, because he had always picked on Brodie’s occasional night nosebleeds for weeks afterwards. _Ha, ha, yeah okay, bloody bedsheets, I’m a lady on my period, super original dude._ It was a good thing for Brodie that he wasn't awake to notice what was happening and recall those conversations. The semi-guilty relief that those memories brought up seemed to stick to him these days, and was no fun at all.   
  
Blood trickled from his nose in a needle-thin stream, landing on the paper with a splat so tiny it made a sparrow shitting seem loud. The next drop, and the one after that, flowed heavily enough to just about make an audible splat. Minutes passed, and the paper darkened with fat splotches of nose blood. Brodie dreamed of the riffs he’d written, and of the sounds of hell drifting through his record-player-turned-interdimensional-phone. He twitched again in his sleep, and blood spread across the paper in a five-cornered shape.   
  
His eyelids fluttered when it began to glow, then settled again, right up until the moment the glow was replaced by a guttural, persistent hum that shook the walls.  
  
“Shit!” Brodie sat up, looked around the shuddering room for a moment, then decided based on his sleepy appraisal that it was just an earthquake. He had left some dishes out close to the edge of the counter, he was pretty sure. While weighing up whether or not it was worth going out there to get them - it was probably about 4am, and who wanted dishes that you needed to worry about during earthquakes, anyway - Brodie finally noticed the blood covering his chin and neck. He wiped it off and put his hand down, striking the bloody music sheet with a clumsily heavy slap, and let out a truly embarrassing noise when the middle of his bedroom floor cracked a meter across.   
  
Scrambling in the dark, he found his bedside lamp, flicking it on just in time to see a blood-slicked hand grabbing at the edge of the crack. Another hand appeared beside it, smacking wetly into the carpet with an axe gripped between the fingers. Brodie screamed again, grabbing the nearest thing within reach, which happened to be his guitar case. He was a split second away from bringing it down on the hand when he saw that following it was a naked human shoulder, then a familiar face. Zakk glared at him as he hauled the rest of his torso out of hell. “Stop checking me out and help me up already!”   
  
“Fuck.” Brodie threw his guitar case to the side and held out an arm. Not a moment too soon, because as soon as Zakk had gotten his legs out of the crevasse below, something tried to follow him.   
  
The faint glow of the slime dripping off its tentacle-like appendages highlighted them in the near-pitch black of Brodie’s room. “Oh, what the _fuck_!” Grabbing Zakk and pulling him away from the hell-portal, Brodie reached for his guitar case again, and struck one writhing tendril with the fat end. The creature felt like it should have roared, but didn't, merely wheezing with a sulfurous breath from wherever its mouth was as it reached out with several tentacles and crushed the guitar case.   
  
“Come _on_ , Brodie!” Zakk still had that axe in hand, and sprung forward to sink the blade into one of the creature’s weirdly sinewy appendages. Glowing goo splattered the floor as the tip of one of them tumbled back into the crevasse, and the eggy wheezing turned into eggy keening when Brodie’s flight-or-fight response finally made up its mind enough for him to start hitting it with a lamp.   
  
“Oh, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the _fuck_ \- ” Brodie’s vocabulary shrunk down to exactly three words, which looped faster and faster as his panic grew. Zakk was yelling at him, and Brodie thumped down onto the floor when a greasy tentacle hit him square in the chest. He couldn’t breathe, then he could, and while doing some flailing to match his winded gasping his hand landed on the same piece of paper he’d just been bleeding on.  
  
He didn’t really know what he was thinking when he ripped it clean in two, but the effect was immediate.   
  
The crack closed on the monster’s limbs like the lips of a frog trying to eat an oversized spider, cutting off the body and leaving them squirming aimlessly. In the monster’s wake there was now only glow-goo-streaked darkness, two people panting in shock, and a smell like Rotorua drinking water.   
  
“What the fuck was that?” Zakk kicked at one of the twitching tentacles still limply flailing on the floor. “It looks like the fuckin, y’know - in the porn with the cartoon Japanese schoolgirls? Not that you would watch anything that has girls in it - ”  
  
“It’s four in the morning, Zakk.” Brodie guessed he’d be cancelling the band meeting tomorrow. “Um, why are you naked?”  
  
“It’s really fucking hot down there.” Zakk had a glowing tentacle-print on his still-heaving chest, and in the weird faint light of it, Brodie thought he could see bloodstains on more than his hands.   
  
“Oh. That makes more sense than I was expecting, to be honest.”  
  
“D’you think we could go back to my old house and get my band shirt collection? It’s kind of worth a lot of money.”  
  
“What, _now_?”  
  
“Fuck no. I gotta eat something.”  
  
********

Of all the things, Brodie hadn’t expected Zakk to return from hell and immediately start judging him. Not for this, anyway.   
  
“Look, there’s a lot of space in the house with only me living here, I can leave a few pizza boxes on the table if I want.” They had not gone back to sleep after the battle with the glowing hell-squid, and Brodie had been relegated to sitting on the kitchen counter, sipping over-strong coffee while Zakk worked himself into a neurotic frenzy over the state of the place. Sunrise was just about starting. It was going to be a long day. “I wonder what we’re meant to do with the dead bits of the hentai monster.”   
  
“Oh, dude, don’t call it that.” Zakk had a slice of cold pizza in one hand, held at a weird angle that left Brodie pretty sure he didn't need to ask which arm had gotten “fucked up” two weeks ago. In the other was a stack of trash. He was eating and picking tissues off the floor at the same time in a way that seemed kind of feverish.   
  
“You called it that first!” The towel Zakk had wrapped around his waist in lieu of real clothes teetered constantly on the edge of falling off his hips, and through the mess of bloodstains, Brodie thought he could see where some unfortunately placed burns left raised marks near his crotch. Best not to ask where those came from. “Do you wanna, like, shower?”   
  
“Why, are you gonna come watch me?”   
  
“Might as well, so you can get all the lectures about how skanky the bathroom is over with while you’re at it.” Brodie nearly choked on his coffee as Zakk snapped in response.   
  
“Fucks sake Brodie! This looks like how my fucking dad leaves the place when I don’t do anything about it!” Zakk paused, hand halfway through the motion of indicating the beer-mottled floor. “ _Left_ it, I guess.”   
  
Brodie didn’t really know how to respond to that. Zakk found an unopened beer on the floor on his way to the shower, then proceeded to stay in that shower for almost a solid hour before returning to the living room and falling asleep on the couch. He did not bother to secure his towel any better before flopping down, and way he was lying made the burns skirting his pubes even more obvious than before. Brodie considered going to sleep himself, but the gross amounts of coffee had done their job. The receptionist at the pharmacy asked him what he needed such a big tube of burn cream for, and Brodie told her that he was just a really shitty cook.   
  
************   
  
“It still looks like shit.” Zakk lounged on the couch in what was now apparently _their_ living room. “We should do something to it.” In the few days since he’d come back from hell, he’d retrieved most of his clothes from his dad’s house, but had shown no signs of actually moving back there. Based on Zakk’s honestly shocking amounts of effort to make the house less disgusting, complete with digging the rotting tentacles a deep grave in the backyard, Brodie could only assume they lived together now.   
  
“Bunnings is still closed till next month. It got really torn up in the almost-apocalypse. So I guess interior decorating has to wait.”   
  
“Fuck off, _interior decorating_ , it doesn’t count as that if you’re gonna paint the walls black.”   
  
“Still shit you gotta buy from Bunnings.”   
  
“I’ll find something.”   
  
True to form, Zakk did find, or “find”, a huge can of black paint within the next day. You did have to admire the sight of him at it, when he let his artistic skills loose on the walls. Him taking his top off to preserve his precious Bloodbath shirt gave his pentagram-daubing in the living room kind of a 90’s Danzig vibe. A lot might have changed since Brodie had first met Zakk, but the low-key enchantment with how cool he could be hadn't.   
  
***********

“Christ.” Medina stood in the living room Zakk and Brodie had “decorated”, appraising their artwork with a weird mix of enjoyment and mild disgust. “Is that meant to be Satan? With the giant veiny dick shooting… blood?”  
  
“It’s a Cannibal Corpse reference”, said Zakk from the sofa. He was on his third beer since 2pm, the time he’d designated as the ‘house drinking line’, but had not been awake for long enough to eat lunch. At least now he’d finally gone to do something about his arm, which was now wrapped in a light cast. His story about being a lost tourist and definitely not a legally dead local had been unconvincing, especially given that half the A&E staff seemed to recognise him, but for probably exactly that reason they had seemed unwilling to challenge it.   
  
“I did catch that, yes. Don’t you have any better bands to use as inspiration?”   
  
“What’s it like being a lesbo now, Medina? The girls in this town still boring?” Zakk belched and dropped his beer can into the bin liner he’d nailed to the sofa.   
  
“More fun than you were. So the answer’s no, then?”

Brodie wasn’t sure if this was a terrible welcome back from the depths of hell, exactly the welcome back Zakk deserved from Medina, or both.   
  
Medina wasn’t done with her appraisal, placing a hand on her hip and sucking in her cheek as she further contemplated the tumescent figure they’d outlined in black paint. “I guess the bong he’s smoking is also a bit of an entry-level reference, but _Dopethrone_ ’s a classic so I can’t really complain…”  
  
Zakk drifted off on the couch quite a while before Medina left. “He's been sleeping a lot lately”, said Brodie by way of apology on his behalf.

“I remember my mum was like that after she had surgery. It's probably the arm healing.” Medina glanced at her watch, appeared to consider for a moment, then picked up the last of Zakk's pack of beers from the table before drinking from it. “Bit surprising he's still so obsessed with you, when he's gone and met Satan enough times to draw his dick on the wall in that much detail”.

“Eh?”   
  
“I guess you're nice and all, which would still be a new one for him.”

“What are you talking about?” Brodie found the way Medina and her friends approached people a lot more comprehensible now than he had a few months ago, but she still came out with stuff that baffled him extremely regularly.   
  
Medina took Zakk's beer and left. When Zakk woke up, he was back to his usual restless self, deciding to add nails to his depiction of Satan’s dick at various odd angles. Brodie had no idea how he had once thought Zakk was the epitome of chill.   
  
*********  
  
“I fucking hate the way people in this town look at me.” Zakk pulled his legs up, crossing them on the park bench he and Brodie were parked on, and glared at the toddler who was watching them wide-eyed from across the lawn. He gestured with his beer can. “Hey, you, tiny fuckin’, person-thing. Go fuck yourself.”   
  
The toddler’s mother picked it up and squinted at Zakk with the same look half this town gave him, the disappointed _well fuck, we all thought we were done with you_ glare that Brodie had actually started to feel really bad on Zakk's behalf for.   
  
While continuing to feel kind of bad for Zakk in general, Brodie did have to admit he deserved the kid’s mother replying to specifically that with “Get a job, ya derro!”, before taking her toddler as far away from the two day-drinking metalheads as possible. At least Zakk wasn't currently swearing at one of the toddlers in this town who looked a bit like him.   
  
Zakk leaned back, flicked his hair back over his shoulders, and threw one arm over the back of the park bench. He didn't seem to be quite so tender around that arm anymore, and in the obnoxiously tight singlet he was wearing, Brodie could see the way the weird bruises and burns all over his body were fading. Could see why there were so many lookalike little kids and girls left disappointed by him in this town, too. Brodie flicked his eyes away from the weird mix of yellow bruises and fuzzy stick-and-pokes on Zakk's shoulder. He didn't know why he always felt a bit weird about noticing the casual bulk of Zakk's shoulders. It was just _true_ that Zakk was a good-looking dude, and probably anyone would let him have a go if he actually asked, and wasn’t like it was Brodie's job to pretend he was blind, or something. What kind of job would pretending to be blind even be, anyway? Probably you would only have to do that in some kind of weird music video, probably the kind that one specific friend of Medina's would write angry tweets about if she found out about it, unless you'd have to do it for some kind of science thing Brodie was way too dumb to understand, or...

“Don't want a fucking job anyway.” Zakk began talking, snapping Brodie out of his reverie as he gave a belated reply to the now-long-gone mum who'd yelled at him. He started rolling a cigarette, scrunching his face up in deep irritation at some unevenness in the result Brodie wouldn't even have noticed. “I dunno how you deal with having one. Wearing a fucking _nametag_ …”

“I mean, it does seem like the easiest way to get money for food. And beer.” Brodie didn't exactly like working at Maccas either, but given that the whole country's uni application stuff had been royally fucked by the almost-apocalypse, he might as well for now. It wasn't like part-time was _terrible_ , or like he really knew what he'd want to do anyway. As far as making music went, living with Zakk involved plenty of that already.

“Don’t know how you deal with smiling at so many stupid cunts for hours and hours. I'd kill someone on the first day.”

“Gotta be used to stupid cunts when I live with you, don't I?”

“Weak, but I guess you had to take the opening” said Zakk, finishing his rollie and stubbing it out on his own leg.   
  
Brodie really felt that with the amount of time they'd spent together lately, he had a sense of when the two of them were enjoying a comfortable silence. Not that it was usually silent at home exactly, because maintaining the impressive kvlt knowledge Zakk had required listening to a _lot_ of new releases. Still, the way Zakk was sitting on the park bench now seemed slightly more tense than his usual baseline twitchiness.

Asking Zakk if he was okay didn't usually go too well. Eventually, his leg-shifting and increasingly dramatic huffing emerged as a question, his tone bizarrely confrontational even for him. “Do you go to work to get away from me?”

“Eh?”

“Am I a, a.” Zakk furrowed his eyebrows. “A worse… a stupider cunt than the stupid cunts at Maccas?”

Brodie really wouldn't have known how to deal with this question even as a joke. Zakk appeared to be about as close to earnest as he ever got, which was even more puzzling. “No?”

“Well then.” Zakk took a deep breath, looking faintly shocked at himself. “Fuckin’... uh, good. Good then.”

The silence that followed was definitely an awkward one. Brodie took a breath and opened his mouth a few times, assuming each time he'd have come up with some way to move the conversation on. Eventually, Zakk supplied something again.

“God! I'm so bored all the fucking time!”

“I'm sure we'll find something for you to do”, said Brodie, feeling as if he sounded like someone's mum. Not his own psycho mum, of course, but the sort of mum he'd gleaned it was kind of normal to have.

Zakk didn't respond, at least not with any actual words. He just sighed, sank down so far on the park bench that his arse was hanging off it, and started rolling another cigarette.   
  
************   
  
“You gotta pick an alignment, Zakk”, said Giles, lifting the hefty rulebook a little in case he got a beer can thrown at him again.   
  
“Chaotic _fucking_ evil” said Zakk, slapping his barely filled-out sheet without even glancing at it.   
  
“...Um, it’s usually kind of annoying to DM for chaotic evil characters, actually. Can’t you be at least, I dunno, chaotic neutral? Chaotic _good_ ?” Giles ducked pre-emptively behind the book.   
  
Zakk just pushed his chair back, stood up, and left the room. Brodie didn’t really blame him. Even before the piss incident, he’d struggled to believe this was exactly _cool,_ and he hadn’t seen Zakk sit still enough to play any kind of game in two weeks.   
  
*************   
  
When he and Medina had broken up, Brodie had been kind of unconvinced by her saying “it’ll be better for you anyway, when you find someone who isn’t phoning it in like this”. It wasn’t like he could actually try to argue with her, but he had been pretty sure that this was what ‘good’ was, and the idea that it could be both kind of phoned-in and still pretty good didn’t seem right. Not that he had much to compare it to, but surely.   
  
Medina always gave off such an impression of being put together. While they’d still been at school, she’d had an amazing gift for convincing teachers she was dutifully paying attention, even while texting under the table the whole time. Brodie had never quite understood how she managed it. Zakk was the complete opposite, the appearance of not giving a single shit betrayed only occasionally by evidence of having thought about everything far too much.   
  
His and Zakk's Thursday night beer and horror movie sessions had always had a weird vibe Brodie couldn’t quite put his finger on. _This_ was certainly sudden, but if Zakk had actually been thinking about doing this the whole time, every time... well, then it and a lot of other things really made sense now. Zakk used his tongue like he was trying to choke you, pawing with desperate clumsiness that was half just the beer and half like the way he tore apart a sandwich after skipping a day’s worth of meals. Brodie finally got what the difference was between being an inoffensive source of human warmth and having someone _want_ you.   
  
Zakk pulled back, panting and pinning Brodie onto the couch by his shoulders. “You’d better fucking not - if you’re letting me do this to take the piss I’ll - ”   
  
“Literally, out of the two of us, which one is more likely to be taking the piss?”   
  
Zakk actually had no smart-arse response to that. In the flickering light of the murder scene still happening on the TV, Brodie saw Zakk’s face fall into an expression he was sure he’d seen before, but for a moment really couldn’t place. It certainly wasn’t one he saw _often_ .   
  
The TV made the sound of someone being brutally decapitated, and Brodie’s sense of deja-vu hit on real memory like a shovel striking metal in the dirt. He was definitely far, far too drunk to think properly about the fact that the only other time he’d seen Zakk this terrified - well, he’d had Zakk’s face in his hand then, too, and now he finally had the chance to do what had briefly crossed his mind in that terrible moment. It had felt so fucked up that he’d even thought about kissing anyone then, much less the man he'd been kneeling over with a knife, a level of weird that had bothered him for months afterwards.   
  
If Zakk was thinking about that time too, though, it didn’t show. When Brodie pulled him down again, he applied himself to Brodie’s face like haphazardly-glued wallpaper. The noise Zakk made when he finally shoved his hand between Brodie’s legs was some kind of desperate moan of relief Brodie hadn’t known he was capable of.   
  
“You’re not - ” Zakk didn’t really seem to be finishing his sentences. “ _Not_ fucking with me, you - hey, look, though.” He pushed himself up on his elbows, then lay his good arm across Brodie’s chest, pinning him firmly again with a scowl that a year ago might have been convincing. “Look. I am _not_ taking it up the arse, okay?”   
  
“Uh.” Brodie wasn’t sure where exactly that had come from, and the way he was being pinned made it extremely hard to work anything out, what with how it seemed to divert the blood supply from his brain. “I’m not gonna make you?”   
  
“So… _you’re_ going to?” Why Zakk seemed so petrified by this, too, was a total mystery.   
  
“...I hadn’t thought about it?”   
  
“One of us has to be the one who takes it. That’s the rules.” Zakk seemed adamant. It was not unlike the way he became adamant, after about four beers, that there were some parts of the South Island where monkey knife fights were legal. _Of course you can’t just Google shit like that and find out the truth, do you believe every fucking thing you read on the internet? Fucking thought so, dipshit._ He was, if Brodie recalled correctly, five beers in now.   
  
“Zakk, you… hate rules. Don’t you always just do what you want?”   
  
Brodie had mostly said that due to having no idea what else there was to say, but Zakk seemed to take it as a revelation. Probably, judging by the face, he was having a whole string of personal realisations here on this couch tonight. Brodie didn’t know how it had never occurred to Zakk before that _fuck the rules, I do what I want_ could probably also apply to kissing another dude and just seeing where it went. Brodie supposed he'd never really realised it either, but now that he was actually doing it, it made so much sense he had no idea why this hadn't happened earlier.   
  
He might know more ways to hotwire a car than anyone really needed, and a surprising amount about music theory, and more words for bleeding than Jeff Walker, but Jesus Christ, Zakk was dumb sometimes. You couldn’t fault how hard he committed to things, though. Even if the head he gave was kind of toothy and inept, it turned out that the hyper-realistic way he could draw dicks on things had indeed always been a sign of real enthusiasm for them.

************  
  
“We can’t just stand here in fucking Bunnings looking at fucking _curtain fabric_ together.” Zakk glanced off to the side with an expression that seemed quite wrong for him. It was the one that normal people got when they were fearing their actions having consequences, like Brodie had seen on Medina’s face when she wasn’t totally sure if there was a camera by the makeup section she was shoplifting from. “People will think we’re a couple of homos or something.”   
  
“We _are_ a couple of homos, Zakk.” While he’d said it quietly, Brodie could hear the unsubtly-following security guard hastily turn his laugh into a cough, and Zakk pulled his hands back from the blackout fabric with his expression briefly shifting into genuine panic.   
  
Zakk looking terrified was something Brodie was slowly getting used to. Zakk seemed to rapidly cycle between every kind of discomfort he seemed capable of, and Brodie just waited.   
  
Without looking at Brodie, eyes still fixed on the all-black fabric display in front of him, Zakk reached out and clumsily grabbed Brodie’s hand. He turned to the security guard. “And what the fuck are _you_ looking at?”   
  
“Nothing at all, mate.” The guard wandered past them, barely concealing his mirth as he gave Zakk’s pockets one last glance, then turning round the corner to the next aisle.   
  
Zakk did not let go of Brodie’s hand, and Brodie could feel how sweaty his palms were when some grandma-age lady passed them by the screwdrivers. Zakk finally realising how contrarian it might be to kiss another dude in the aisles of the local discount home and hardware store was certainly something. Brodie probably shouldn’t have let them both get as carried away as they did, because when that same security guard discovered them making improper use of the disabled bathroom, the talk they got from the manager was genuinely pretty embarrassing.   
  
_“Neither of youse are welcome at Bunnings Warehouse anymore.”_ Zakk raised his voice about half an octave higher than it needed to be for his impression of her, once they’d left. “ Think of the cleaners! Think of the customers who need the special restroom in decent condition! Ooh! Guess I’ll just go back to fucking stealing paint then, ya fucking cow...”   
  
“Speaking of cows”, said Brodie. “I heard the slaughterhouse is hiring.”   
  
“Hm.” Zakk didn’t immediately shut it down. “Right.”   
  
“I mean, not that it would be cows, I think. Probably like, lambs, at the moment.”   
  
“Oh, real cute little baby ones? Fucked up.” said Zakk appreciatively. He seemed to be in a great mood after getting in minor trouble for something, and had not let go of Brodie’s hand again after haughtily dragging him away from their telling-off. The one old man who had given them a funny glance in their walk through the suburbs had been gleefully flipped the bird.   
  
“I Googled it again. I think you do have to have a conversation with a cop to get not-legally-dead enough to have a job.”   
  
Zakk sighed, and the irritation actually seemed to be mostly a put-on. “Oh well. At least they won’t have any trouble recognising me.”


End file.
